Blending sciences: The benefits and pitfalls of interdisciplinary research

One of the loudest buzzwords in current science politics is interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinary research requires that multidisciplinary teams assemble and create a common language and framework for discovery and innovation. This offers huge benefits, but how easy is it in practice? Apart from attitudinal resistance, differing research methods, a lack of funding and dissemination possibilities, communication barriers among the different disciplines often puts a spanner in the works. In this salon three scientists will share their successes and failures in interdisciplinary collaboration.

PROGRAMME

19:30: Welcome

19:35: Lecture by Paul Halstead (The University of Sheffield):'Food production and diet in the Mediterranean longue durée: challenges of, and lessons from, blending humanities, natural sciences and social sciences'

Ana Naomi de Sousa is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker. She collaborates with Forensic Architecture and is currently working on a feature-length documentary.

Ann Dooms leads a research group in Digital Mathematics. The word 'digital' is derived from the Latin word 'digitus', which means finger, and hence refers to finger-counting used to enumerate objects. Data that can only take a discrete number of values is therefore called digital.
Our society is completely digitized leading to applications of mathematics in our everyday life, everywhere and anywhere. Constant streams of data are being captured, analyzed and communicated. Today is the era of so-called "big data": we never encountered such volumes of data, at such speeds, of so many different kinds and yet with quite some uncertainty. New paradigms of mathematics come to the rescue in this interdisciplinary field bringing together mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers up to social scientists and lawyers.
Ann Dooms holds a PhD in Mathematics (2004) and is specialized in Digital Information Forensics and Security. She is a member of the Jonge Academie and the IEEE TC Information Forensics and Security. She was nominated in 2013 for the EOS Gouden Pipet and received in 2014 the Second Prize in Science Communication from the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium in Sciences and Arts.